Sophocles is almost the last representative of the earlier and happier period of the Athenian Empire, their golden age as it seemed later, when to the complacent imagination of the male citizen all things seemed to be working together in the direction of progress and freedom. Progress indeed there was, and for men freedom of thought, for the intellectual atmosphere of Athens in the middle of the fifth century B.C., with its combination of clear knowledge and bracing speculation, has never been surpassed. But as a society, Athens already contained within herself the seeds of decay and destruction. The wealth of her intellectual achievement barely concealed the poverty of her social morality, and it was only by dint of firmly closing their eyes to the degradation of their women and the misery of their slaves that the Athenians maintained for a time the fond illusion that everything was for the best in the best of all possible cities. Then came the shock of the Peloponnesian War and the inherent weaknesses of a free State which refuses political freedom to more than half its population were cruelly revealed. For nearly thirty years, with some few breathing spaces, the struggle went on, while Athens tried to force a culture intellectually superior but morally inferior to that of many other of the Greek peoples upon a reluctant world: and in the end she failed and fell. After the fifth century the political importance of Athens disappears; her intellectual pre-eminence is saved for her by a small group of men who under the hard teaching of war discerned the flaws of her social system and set themselves resolutely to the task of criticism and reform. The nobility of war, the nobility of birth, the nobility of sex: these are some of the prejudged questions that the Socratic Circle ventured to dispute, and their contentions, as we have them recorded in the literature of the late fifth and the early fourth centuries, form perhaps the most valuable legacy that the Greek mind has left us. But, like so much of Greek thought, their ideas require interpretation for a modern reader. Some of the greatest of the Circle, Socrates and Antisthenes, for example, we only know in the writings of other men, and we have to disentangle the master’s ideas from those of his disciples. Plato and Xenophon were drawn away by metaphysics and soldiering, and social problems form only a part of their interests. Euripides and Aristophanes were compelled to conform to the conventions of Attic tragedy and comedy, and we must always discount the influence of the stage; Euripides is often less and Aristophanes more serious than suits our ideas of a tragic and a comic writer. Lastly, for all the group except Xenophon, irony was the favourite weapon of attack, an irony so deftly veiled that it made the bitterest criticism possible, and still often passes undetected.